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Moving to the Country: paintings by Jane Ostler 20th August – 16th September 2018

How I create the work.

I start a picture by outlining very faintly, in paint or pencil, a basic compositional structure. This gives the work an inherent order to build upon. I use geometric shapes and human forms. Geometric shapes offer an objective stability. They can be repeated into a pattern. Human forms offer a more subjective, narrative way into the painting. I then paint areas with oil paint on stretched primed canvas or water colour on stretched water colour paper. Oil paintings are left, sometimes for years, between work sessions. I use an electric sander to remove dried oil paint if I am not happy with it.

I have tried to combine plants with my paintings, because I want to help maintain good air quality.

What my work means.

I leave the meaning of my work open. Painting offers a reflective space, but I obviously have a process. The impulse to make something, to be busy, to create, continues behind other necessities of my life. It’s there in the background all the time, the continuous niggling wish to comment.
This persistent thread carries me along. I try to solidify emotions in an art form. Circumstances, human histories, whys, wherefores, assumptions, comedies and errors. Making things bigger or smaller, scaling them up and down and retaining a sense of proportion, space and perspective.

The process.

They say that every good story starts with an ending. In a way painting can start like that too. I value early mornings, when it is quiet and still. Translucent forms; repetition; atmospheres; driving around a roundabout twice every day for ten years, looking at the crows’ nests and the cars and waiting for my turn to join the flow of traffic. Seeking avenues of escape, circumnavigating blockages, seeking clarity, answers…, and then moving on, is the process. I like fragmentary subjects from ordinary life, plunged into extreme situations, like a comfortable armchair engulfed by the sea, people sun bathing on a beach oblivious to their humanity, a boat vanishing over the distant horizon, letting it all go.

In retrospect it is easy to edit out all the difficulties and want to forget them. But being stuck and trying to work through them is a recurrent theme. Comfort. Shortage of time. Wrong priorities. Habits. Ignorance. I get unstuck if I make art.